There have always been reasons to feel that one's true place in the worldis irretrievably lost in the past. Imagined golden ages seem an essentialform of mediation between the inadequate present and our sense of realselfhood. Self-consciousness about invoking absent authenticity has beencharacteristic of postmodernity, but so too has a feeling ofuniversalised, unfulfillable longing. And for all the apparentconservatism of nostalgia, appeals to the lost glories of the past havebeen among the most potent of revolutionary battle cries. Nostalgicdesires â€" melancholic, consoling, or bitter â€" still constantly revise thecultural landscape.

We are looking for papers from across the social sciences, arts andhumanities that reflect on the human habit of looking back on other,better homes somehow left behind us. We are interested both in papers thatfocus closely on the particular pains and pleasures of mourning for a morecomforting age, and in those that open out on to general concerns withmemory, identity, place and history.

Nostalgic experience in any time or place and representations of nostalgiain theory, literature, film, photography, theatre, fashion, architecture,art, music and popular culture could all come under scrutiny. Fruitfultopics might include:

Romantic, modern and postmodern nostalgiaMyths of national, ethnic or racial identity and heritagePastoral and elegyCommemoration and public memoryEcology, ecopoetics and nostalgiaTheories of historyNostalgia for empire or imperial self-confidencePrimitivism; Rousseau; childhoodKitsch; consumerism; irony; traumaHomesickness in the immigrant, ex-pat or exile experiencePurification and exclusionary nostalgiaPolitical homelands; governments in exileRuins, rurality and conservationPsychoanalysis, self-identity, subjectivityThe future of nostalgia